Not a poster

Exhibit A is a pair of recent acquisitions from eBay.

Frys chocolate varieties ephemera from eBay

The second one is, to my mind, a rather good bit of graphic design.

Fry's chocolate snowdrops ephemera

Now these are in lovely condition – they apparently came from the printer’s own archive – and so we thought we’d got a bit of a bargain.  Until they arrived.  They’re, um, quite small, as you can see from my cunning Minifigure + cat hair scaling device.

size of frys chocolate snowdrops poster thing

Now this is not the fault of the seller, although I could perhaps argue that they are not in fact posters; mostly the surprise is entirely of our own doing for not reading the dimensions on the listing.  So today’s moral is, read those eBay listings carefully otherwise you may not get what you think you’re getting.

All of which does rather beg the question of what in fact we did actually get.  I’m not even sure what the pieces of paper are for – Mr Crownfolio reckons that they are labels for sweet jars but I’m open to other suggestions if you have them.  Then there’s the matter of who designed them?  A brief investigation hasn’t come up with anything.  And what is a chocolate snowdrop anyway?  I have no idea.  But I do like their label.

While I am here, you might as well see a few other things we’ve bought recently, starting with a whole heap of GPO posters.  These three came from the same seller.

GPO evening calls poster brings you together 1963

USe the Household delivery service poster GPO 1964

Harry Stevens GPO poster sherlock holmes 1980

You won’t be too surprised to learn that the last one is by Harry Stevens.  What’s a bit more amazing is that it’s from 1980.  I think we may have a date for the last gasp of the classic GPO poster there.

This one only dates from 1966, but it’s a double winner, partly because it’s by Andre Amstutz, and partly because I love these Properly Packed Parcels Please posters and can’t get enough of them.

Amstutz properly packed parcels please poster 1966 GPO

While the last exhibit is, in a way, the reverse of the Fry’s chocolate ones, because it turned up in the post and was actually more interesting than I expected.

Scout bob a job week poster

Just look at those paper sculpture scouts.  A sentence you don’t get to use often enough.

 

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